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county, where he had discovered old coins from the Roman, Greek, Polish-Lithuanian, and Russian

eras. As he chatted to the cart driver who drove him from Stadniki, Hoffman discovered local

knowledge that might otherwise have been inaccessible to an outsider like himself. He learned, for

instance, that a saber and rifles had also been ploughed up before the First World War, only to be

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subsequently looted from the museum in Równe.

While such trips might, in other circumstances, be interpreted as the work of a somewhat

eccentric local history buff, Hoffman’s interest was no frivolous hobby. Like his counterparts across

Europe, he believed that the political success of the state relied on its ability to foster cultural

connections between myriad and diverse localities across the country, and he advocated for the role

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of teachers who, under the right conditions, could collect and disseminate provincial knowledge.
This approach was not particularly innovative. It had itself been enshrined in the Polish national

curriculum (by the end of their first year of school, children had to be able to define their local

community and the community of Poland more broadly) and it was frequently expressed on the pages

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of nationwide educational journals. “For the rural teacher,” wrote the Polish regionalist, pedagogue,
and social activist Aleksander Patkowski in 1923, “the life of the village can become an

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inexhaustible treasure trove of knowledge.” But Hoffman launched an ambitious program of

institutionalizing networks of regional knowledge from the late 1920s onward in a province on the

fringes, a place where people continued to lack a basic understanding of how their everyday lives

could be imagined within the context of the larger Polish state project.

43 Letter to the director of the state archeological museum in Warsaw (April 26, 1930), DARO 160/1/77/81.
44 Jakub Hoffman, “Oświata pozaszkolna i samorządy,” Przegląd Wołyński, May 25, 1930, 5. This was in the same
spirit as the German Heimatkunde that developed in the late nineteenth century. See Kennedy, “Regionalism and
Nationalism,” 20-22.
45 See Dorota Wojtas, “Learning to Become Polish: Education, National Identity and Citizenship in Interwar Poland,
1918-1939” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2003), 112.
46 Aleksander Patkowski, “Praca naukowa na wsi,” Głos Nauczycielski, April 30, 1923, 106.

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